Seats of the week: Forde and Herbert

A double feature encompassing two of the LNP-held seats which Labor is eyeing greedily on the back of its Queensland poll resurgence.

UPDATE (Morgan): The weekly Morgan poll is little changed on last time, with Labor down half a point to 41.5%, the Coalition steady on 41%, and the Greens up two points to 9%. There is actually a slight move in Labor’s favour on two-party preferred as measured using preference flows from the previous election, presumably because of rounding, their lead up from 51.5-48.5 to 52-48. On respondent-allocated preferences, the lead is steady at 52.5-47.5. Regrettably, the poll does not come with state breakdowns, which keen observers among us had started to think would be a regular feature (as it surely should be with such a large sample size). We will surely have Newspoll along later this evening, while the regular Essential Research is delayed this week and will be along tomorrow.

Two for the price of one this week as I scramble to catch up with the Queensland seats suddenly deemed in play under Kevin Rudd 2.0 …

Seat of the week #1: Forde

Straddling the southern edge of Brisbane, Forde was one of a number of Queensland seats which fell Labor’s way under Kevin Rudd’s leadership at the 2007 election, only to be lost again in the wake of his demise three years later. The electorate contains the eastern part of the municipality of Logan City around Beenleigh and extends southwards along the Pacific Motorway to accommodate, somewhat awkwardly, the rapidly growing suburb of Upper Coomera at the interior northern edge of the Gold Coast. The latter area was acquired in the redistribution which preceded the 2010 election, when Forde provided the new seat of Wright with about a third of its voters in rural territories extending to the New South Wales border.

Forde was created with the expansion of parliament in 1984, at which time it covered Brisbane’s outer south-west. Liberal candidate David Watson won the seat on its debut by 43 votes, but was unseated after a single term at the 1987 election by Labor’s Mary Crawford. Watson would later return to politics in the state parliament, eventually leading the Liberal Party into a disastrous result at the 2001 election. Crawford meanwhile built up a handy margin on the back of swings in 1990 and 1993, before a punishing redistribution pulled the seat into the rural Beaudesert region on the New South Wales border. Thwarted in a bid to be reassigned to an outer suburban seat, in part as a consequence of the party’s determination to accommodate Kevin Rudd in Griffith, Crawford was left with no buffer to defend herself against the savage swing that hit Labor across Queensland, which struck in Forde to the tune of 9.6%.

Forde was then held for the Liberals throughout the Howard years by Kay Elson, who retained comfortable margins in 1998 and 2001 before enjoying a further 5.9% boost in 2004. Elson’s retirement at the 2007 election was presumably a factor behind the spectacular 14.4% swing to Labor, making the seat one of three in Queensland where Labor was able to overhaul double-digit Coalition margins. It was then held for a term by Brett Raguse, a former teacher, local newspaper publisher and TAFE college director who had more recently worked as an adviser to state ministers associated with the AWU/Labor Forum sub-faction of the Right. The aforementioned redistribution improved Raguse’s margin from 2.9% to 3.4%, but this proved insufficient at the 2010 election in the face of what by Queensland standards was a fairly typical swing of 5.0%.

The seat has since been held for the LNP by Bert van Manen, a financial planner from Slacks Creek who had run as the Family First candidate for Rankin in 2007. Van Manen’s Labor opponent at the coming election is Des Hardman, a radiographer at Logan Hospital. Brett Raguse meanwhile re-emerged as a candidate for the preselection to succeed Craig Emerson in the neighbouring seat of Rankin, in which he was narrowly unsuccessful despite claiming support from Kevin Rudd.

Seat of the week #2: Herbert

The Townsville-based electorate of Herbert has been in conservative hands without interruption since 1996, although it has been highly marginal throughout that time. The seat has existed since federation, at which time it extended north to Cairns and south to Mackay. More recently it has covered central Townsville and a shifting aggregation of surrounding territory, the pre-2010 election redistribution having transferred the southern suburbs of Annandale and Wulguru to Dawson and added Deeragun and its northern coastal surrounds from Kennedy. The strongest booths for Labor are generally around the town centre, while those in the outer suburbs tend to be more volatile as well as more conservative, having moved strongly with the statewide tides toward Labor in 2007 and against it in 2004 and 2010. Lavarack Barracks makes the electorate highly sensitive to defence issues, with the sector accounting for about one in eight jobs in the electorate. Presumably as a consequence, the electorate is unusually youthful, the median age of 32 being four years lower than for any other seat in regional Queensland.

Herbert was a working class and Labor seat for much of its history, being in Labor hands until the 1960s and turning in a 34.2% vote for Communist Party candidate Frederick Paterson in 1943 (Paterson went on to win the state seat of Bowen the following year, the only such success for a Communist candidate in Australian history). A watershed moment came with the victory of Liberal candidate Robert Bonnett in the 1966 landslide, which was followed by further Liberal swings against the trend of the 1969 and 1972 elections. The seat came back on Labor’s radar after the 1980 election, when their candidate Ted Lindsay succeeded in reducing the Liberal margin to below 1%. Lindsay went one better when he ran again in 1983, gaining the seat with a 3.7% swing and retaining it throughout the Hawke-Keating years. Together with most of his Queensland Labor colleagues he was unseated at the 1996 election, when unrelated Liberal candidate Peter Lindsay won off a 9.0% swing. Ted Lindsay came within 160 votes of pulling off a comeback in 1998, before Peter Lindsay consolidated with swings of 1.5% in 2001 and 4.7% in 2004. He survived another close shave by 343 votes in 2007, a swing to Labor of 5.9% being slightly below a statewide 7.5% which cost the Coalition eight seats.

Lindsay bowed out at the 2010 election and was succeeded as candidate for the Liberal National Party by Ewen Jones, an auctioneer for local real estate agency Ferry Property. Jones’s Labor opponent was Tony Mooney, who served for nearly two decades as mayor of Townsville and earned a footnote in Australian political history when his failure to win the 1996 Mundingburra by-election for Labor led to the downfall of the Goss government. Perhaps reflecting the loss of Lindsay’s personal vote, Jones picked up what by Queensland standards was a modest swing of 2.2%, which was nonetheless enough to secure his hold on a seat which the redistribution had made, by the narrowest of margins, notionally Labor. Jones’s Labor opponent this time is Cathy O’Toole, a former chief executive of a disability employment service and member of the Left faction.

I have said this many times, but happy to do so again:
1. Australia is responsible for its own actions, not the actions of others, so in my view we should behave like Australians at all times. We have also signed international agreements promising to do certain things, so we should do them.
2. If someone applies for protection because they have a well founded fear of persecution, we should investigate that. If they are under our control we should do mandatory health checks (TB, malaria, measles etc. This is very quick- could be days). Also, mandatory security checks.
3. There should be no detention of children
4. Community placements while the applications are being processed
5. Save the $100-$200,000 we spend per person trying to torture them and flying dozens of times back and forth to remote centres in Port Headland and Woomera etc, and have them located in big cities close to DIMIA officials. Spend the saved money on supporting our regional partners to relocate them and look after them in Malaysia/Indonesia.
6. Increase our humanitarian intake

This is not a big issue for Australia, despite the way it is portrayed. At the current fast rate of arrivals, which will always ebb and flow with international push factors, but even at the current fast rate, it would take x years for Australia to reach the number of undocumented people currently in the USA.

‘It may be a bit of a hellhole but for a person in Iran or Afghanistan wishing to get away from a well-founded fear of persecution in their home country, surely it is better than staying put.’

We are conducting a very expensive experiment on self-selected guinea pigs to ascertain the answer to your rhetorical question.

Currently we would have to say that the guinea pigs do not have full information. For example, do they know that if they are settled in the Highlands and they are women and they face near certainty of sexual abuse?

You know as well as I do (and we already have already compelling evidence for this) that the vast majority, if not all, asylum seekers will abandon their attempts to head for this part of the world once they understand they will be settled in PNG, if their refugee application is successful. That is the reality.

I also agree with no children in poverty, noone starving anywhere in the world, I agree with a much fairer distribution of wealth across the globe, I disagree with child labor, exploitation of women and children ….

Oh wait your solution IS solving all the worlds problems.

The alternative is to deal with the problem that Australians feel threatened by, re-establish domestic comfort and then see what steps we can take on those great big problems.

At the moment we are wasting huge resources on this problem and our population is getting less and less interested in helping anyone but themselves.

I think you are right with that.
Attitudes have hardened as may be seen on PB where Psephos has had considerable success in convincing others who previously disagreed with his views.

Psephos is one screwed up puppy; hopfully no-one takes him seriously.

Suggesting that there be no Visas policy makes no sense if your only option is to drown them, create an underclass in Australia because they can’t can’t work or lock them up forever.

Rudd’s brillance in this case is to come up with a forth option.

Hi frednk.
I think you are a bit hard on Psephos.
I have frequently disagreed with Psephos, but I have also respected him for the quality of his posts.
In this particular case, he convinced me, and it seems others, over a period of time that the solution he proposed was the only one that would work.
Rudd, with the help of the PNG PM, has worked out the nuts and bolts of the practical implementation.
Well done Psephos, well done team KR.

Wanting to end child labour is not an excuse for sending teenage girls to a country where sexual violence is rife.

Wanting to end hunger is not an excuse for sending young men to a country where violence is rife.

If Australia takes people under their care, packs them up, sends them to another country and hands them over to that country then it has a responsibility to ensure that there are protections in place, whether or not they are genuine refugees.

Or when people criticised George W Bush for rendition and those detainees were tortured (in Egypt for example), did you say:
“oh, well there is a lot of torture in the world, there was nothing George W Bush could do about that”

OPT, where do people who sneak across to north Queensland live? I’m surprised that it’s so far removed from bureaucracy that you can happily live and work there with no Australian documentation or a bank account

FNQ baking hot & usually very humid (or pouring) – 28C is sweater time – so minimum need for clothing. There’s enough cheap (& ..er .. “wild”) timber around to make a dugout canoe, or build a boat & a shack (many do). Until quite recently, power didn’t penetrate far into the jungle.

For decades, people have “lost” themselves in FNQ, as they used to on remote gemfields before mechanisation. Out of the cities & bigger towns, labour is casual, tourist, seasonal, often for short periods, often in remote locations, and paid in cash: “backpacker jobs”. Ask no questions and you’ll be told no lies is less an adage than a mantra!

So why would you need documentation, or a bank account – unless you were collecting a pension of some sorts? Who’s going to recognise a dark skinned-person in an area where, even whities tan dark-brown? An odd accent where tourists & transients are normal?

People from southern PNG used to boat (island-hop) down to The Cape, thence to cities for hospital & other medical treatment (TB is a problem), though I think Newman stopped that aid. Think there’s something unusual about a tinny-full of people crossing the Strait? Don’t be silly! Tinnies are common. Many kids have to “island hop” to school!

I recommend a decent holiday in FNQ. Include the Daintree; though, now a ‘decent” road is through (if it survived 2013′s wet) it’s getting almost civilized – to the I don’t want to be civilized or found locals’ horror.

In fact, go slowly right up the Cape, take a trip to the numerous Reef islands; take a tinny to PNG (not far) & back; return down the Cape’s western (Bauxite & Wild Rivers) side, around the Gulf – tinny across to the Gulf’s Islands (though seek Indigenous permission first) – then on up to Darwin; then ferry/ tinny across to the Tiwi Islands (where the Timor & Arafura Seas meet). You’re again close to islands to our North!

Do that, and you’ll understand why nicking across the Timor& Arafura seas, & Torres Strait, then getting lost in the Top End – but earning & living quite well without documentation – is what anyone who knows the Top End would expect intrepid ASs housed in PNG to do.

You know as well as I do (and we already have already compelling evidence for this) that the vast majority, if not all, asylum seekers will abandon their attempts to head for this part of the world once they understand they will be settled in PNG, if their refugee application is successful. That is the reality.’

It may turn out to be the reality but it is not a reality yet. There are a number of known ‘realities’ that may have a bearing on the policy. The first is that PNG governments are notoriously unstable. The second is that regionalism is quite strong and it may well happen that what a central PNG decides is not what the regions accept. The third is that the judiciary, UN Convention aside, simply refuses to approve rendition from Australia to PNG because of the threat to health and life. (PNG life expectancy is 10-20 years less than that of Australia.) The fourth is that enough Australians might come to the conclusion that rape as an integral element of Australian migration policy is unacceptable.

But there are hidden sleepers, as there usually are with rushed policy making.

Burke was just saying that welfare costs for resettled people will be paid for by Australia. He put no time limits on those welfare costs. If the thousands of refugees currently squatting in Malaysia with no such support, with only illegal and somewhat persecuted ‘employment’ available for survival, with no access to education or medicine, and with living quarters subject to constant harrassment by local police, then Australian subsidised welfare payments in PNG might be a very attractive proposition.

Sabai island. This used to be part of the Queensland land grab. A post colonial settlement was reached in which Sabai was ceded to PNG but the water around it remain Australian waters, I believe. Australia pays for quite a lot of medical treatment on Sabai because it is an obvious jumping off point for diseases that we do not want.

And yes, as noted above somewhere, Sabai Islanders were transferred as a community to Australia.

Across the individual states, only Queensland (12,104), Western Australia (11,091), Victoria (1,296) and the Australian Capital Territory (755) have seen a net gain in population from interstate migrants (ie more residents arrived over the state/terriroty {sic} border than left for other states/territories). Over the year to September 20123{sic}, the net number of interstate migrants arriving in Queensland was at its highest level since the 12 months to December 2009

Wanting to end child labour is not an excuse for sending teenage girls to a country where sexual violence is rife.

Wanting to end hunger is not an excuse for sending young men to a country where violence is rife.

I certainly didn’t say it was, but even if I had, signing a 1950′s convention is no excuse for neglecting everyone but those that have the 30k to get on a people smugglers boat. Your view not only encourages people smuggling and drowning at sea, it essentially defeats the purpose of the convention. If you were Sean I’d understand where you are coming from. If you were a green I’d understand where you are coming from. What you are saying makes no sense from any other point of view.

bemused
Posted Sunday, July 21, 2013 at 9:33 am | Permalink
....
Hi frednk.
I think you are a bit hard on Psephos.
I have frequently disagreed with Psephos, but I have also respected him for the quality of his posts.
In this particular case, he convinced me, and it seems others, over a period of time that the solution he proposed was the only one that would work.
Rudd, with the help of the PNG PM, has worked out the nuts and bolts of the practical implementation.
Well done Psephos, well done team KR.

I have no issue’s with the quality of Psephos posts, he writes as I wish I could. I have serious issues with his politics. He would do well in imperial France, I would mention Germany and the damage right wing nutters in the socialist party did; but that would invoke Goodwins law.

Rudd has not done what the right wing nutters like Psephos wanted; Rudd has found a very neat solution.

Mod Lib can cry a river of tears, but in the end, if these guys are genuine then PNG would look like an OK option.

As an aside if you actually did what Psephos advocated in one of his wilder post, they could; as PNG citizans end up in our army; he is all for using PNG citizans for that; “they might like the work”.

If Labor is smart they will sell this as a neat solution, not right wing nutters gone wild, which is how Psephos would like it seen.

About this blog

William Bowe is a doctoral candidate with the University of Western Australia’s Discipline of Political Science and International Relations. He has been running the electoral studies blog The Poll Bludger since January 2004, independently until September 2008 and thereafter with Crikey.